XBOX Live Arcade game discussions

[jba]

These games are probably my favorite part of my XBOX experience so far (I've had the 360 for a month or so). I spent some time beating gears of war but otherwise I've mostly been playing the arcade games. My favorites:

1. Assault Heroes: I think this just came out a week or two ago but it is by far the funnest game. It reminds me of some old NES games like ikari warriors and commando. Drive around shooting stuff in a fun little cart with three distinct upgradeable weapons (machine gun, cannon, flamethrower) - if your car gets destroyed you have to walk around with a POS gun for 20-30 seconds until a new car spawns - die without your car and you lose a life. The game is much easier in co-op mode either local or over xbox live - especially against the bosses where it works well to have one guy on full-time cannon against the boss and the other machine gunning down any fast little guys. It doesn't take long to beat the game but I still keep playing it. I haven't tried the hard level yet but I'll probably do that next.

2. feeding frenzy. no idea how I got hooked on this game but the girlfriend wanted it, I played a couple times and was HOOKED. You start out each stage as a tiny little fish eating littler fish and trying not to be eaten by the bigger fish. The more you eat the more you grow and are able to eat bigger and bigger fish. It's pretty easy to win the regular mode, but the timed mode was harder - one of the earlier stages with barracudas was tough, beat that one and you're home free.

3. Lumines (aka crack-tetris). It's like tetris but more complicated. each block has four squares each square having two possible colors. blocks may be rotated and then dropped. when a rectangle of 2+ by 2+ squares of like colors are created they are cleared (there is an additional factor of the timeline that I don't really know how to describe). I'm finding the second tier of the timed achievements to be nearly impossible - I've seen video on youtube of a guy getting 167 in 60 secs which looks SICK! This is a good game and probably the one with the most replay.

I've played a bunch of demos for the other games, none really seemed all that great but maybe there's a diamond in the rough. There is a new game called novadrome that seems pretty fun (seems like Twisted Metal?), but the controls/physics seemed a little funky. Anybody tried this one?